Technical Information

•   Camera: Canon EOS A2 SLR
•   Lens:      Canon 28mm wide angle 
•   Film:       Fujichrome Velvia

All photos shown on this website started life not as digital files, but as 35mm slides. I use Fujichrome for its remarkable sharpness and rich colour saturation.

The intriguing thing about photos made with a wide angle lens (as opposed, say, to a 'normal' 50mm) is that our eye is led not so much in a wide sweep from one side of the scene to the other, but from out here, where we sit, to in there, where we join with the scene itself. There is, of course, a relatively broad field of view. But the deep focus and 'close-in' perspective of this lens create a more dynamic sense of involvement, and make it harder for us to keep a detached or 'aesthetic' standpoint.

This is very different from what happens at the telephoto end of the focal-length spectrum, where focus is compressed and perspective is flattened. We are left feeling safer, perhaps, but still somehow on the outside looking in. This is fine if you want to isolate a backlit poppy against a vaguely purple sky, or to capture in apparent close-up a grim hyena drooling over her prey. The downside of shooting exclusively with a 28 is that you lose that shot of the hyena, or else you jump out of the Land Rover and risk losing your camera and much of your arm.

I own a tripod, and should use it at all times. I never do. And since I am shooting a slow 50 ASA film, any lack of blur in these pictures is owing entirely to good light and therefore a decent shutter speed, or the sheer good luck of having the shutter trip right between jiggles.

Speaking of good light, this is the sine qua non. There are people who can take good pictures in the flat, glaring light of the midday sun, but I am not one of them. As for subject matter and compositional form, these of course matter a great deal. But nothing matters if the pictures don't capture a certain quality of reflected or radiated light.

The photographs offered for sale here  (click on How to Order Prints for more details) are archival inkjet (giclée) prints made by scanning the colour slides into Adobe Photoshop and then printing them on an Epson Stylus Photo 2200 printer using Epson Premium Luster paper. The most reliable testing of Epson pigment-based inks on this paper predict a colour-fast and fade-free life of between 50 and 80 years.

A final note: the low-resolution images on this website only hint at the quality of the high-resolution scans used in making the prints.